


Don’t Call it Darkness

by allsorrowsborne



Series: A Feeling, Undefined [4]
Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: Eventual Comfort, F/F, Hurt, POV Villanelle | Oksana Astankova, Season 3, Self-Harm, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-15
Updated: 2020-05-15
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:48:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24190840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allsorrowsborne/pseuds/allsorrowsborne
Summary: Set in the future. Villanelle remembers the time after Gryzmet. Trauma, healing, and saving yourself.Non-linear, borderline poetry/prose.[tw - includes self-harm]
Relationships: Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova
Series: A Feeling, Undefined [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1743235
Comments: 16
Kudos: 96





	Don’t Call it Darkness

**Author's Note:**

> Oh love you were a sickly child / and how the wind knocked you down / put on your spurs, swagger around / in the desperate kingdom of love (PJ Harvey, The Desperate Kingdom of Love)

It starts with the smell. Burning plastic, like a spatula left in a pan on the burner. She heads to the kitchen to move it, to stop it, but the smoke hits fast. It enters her nose first – always – then sometimes her mouth, sometimes her eyes. She’s okay, okay, until her ears start pounding, blood like a hammer, ferrying oxygen, quickening thought. She runs for the door, but she cannot see one, cannot see anything in this room that’s started to tip. She loses balance and reaches for something to steady her, stop her from falling. Sometimes there’s nothing, but this time there’s something, swinging into her flailing hands. The rope is rough and thick, but she grips it easily, pulling herself into the climb. Hand over hand. But the rope crumbles, turning to ash and she falls and falls and falls.

Every shitty night.

Years later, when Villanelle remembers, it always starts with the dream.

She remembers waking, screaming, sweating, and reaching for Eve and Eve was gone.

The other memories are out of order. They come and go, rearranged.

\---

She remembers her teacher, Anna, the one who loved her, if that’s what it was. She went to her home with wounds to tend, inflicted by others. Children. Adults. It was easy to get them to hurt her. Prod just a little and watch fists fly. She found it easy to control them, to make them hit her when it suited her, rather than hurt her when they chose. She didn’t feel the bruises much. It took much more for pain to sink in. A knife to the stomach perhaps? Ha. A girl could dream.

Sometimes it wasn’t the others. Sometimes she did it to herself. Nothing if not self-sufficient. The cut near her eye that Anna tended? She swung a hammer. It took some nerve, but she had plenty, and once she started, momentum and gravity finished the job. Split skin. Swelling. It always worked. A way to let the pressure escape her. A surefire way to draw Anna in, to make her want it, make her do it, make her move from bathroom to bed. To wipe her face with something wet and make her feel like a child. To wipe her face with something wet and make her feel like –

\---

She remembers going back. A house with a mother and brother and other people. Home. Not home. She remembers the field, afterwards, running. Dirt, fridge, bubbles from soda, kitchen counter. She tried to escape when she heard that woman, to find a door in a room that tipped. A parody of a mother’s hug with arms of wood that splintered her body, kindling.

She stood on the edge of this thing called togetherness and saw closeness, denied.

\---

She remembers finding her way to Eve. She stayed a while, a couple of days, a night, and it should have been everything, but it was not. Eve saw her and knew her and stroked her cheek and called her Oksana – her fucking deadname – and Villanelle screamed and threatened and pushed. Hard. Eve fell. _Admit it, I am my mother’s daughter. Admit it Eve, you wish I was here. We are the same, Eve, admit it admit it._ And Eve said no, just like her mother, and Villanelle broke again.

They fucked twice and fought once and she didn’t see Eve again for years.

She might as well have doused her in petrol.

Sometimes hurt does not like comfort. Sometimes comfort makes it worse.

\---

She remembers reinvention. One hundred moments of breaking apart and refusing to shatter. She grew skilled at picking through pieces, rusty, shiny, and fashioning them into someone new.

She molded a shield from ash and tomatoes, her father’s laughter. the hair that clogged the prison drains. Armor from her teacher’s orgasm, brother’s pride, mother’s cruelty, birthday balloons. She crafted survival and gave it a name.

Perfume, poetry, repetition, made of letters sharp as knives.

Villanelle. She tried to shed it. It did not work. This was more than a child playing dress up, more than a costume that could be removed.

Villanelle. An invention that became part of her history, part of her body. Blood and art beneath long-ago scabs, a tattoo sunken in skin.

Villanelle. A tattoo that faded and stretched with time, growing old, becoming new.

Villanelle. The power to name. A mother’s prerogative. She never used Oksana again.

Even permanence changes.

\---

She remembers that Eve could not save her. She remembers saving herself. Killing her mother helped. It gave a shape to the hole inside her, a body to match the ghost that stalked her, a place to hang her grief.

She learned the contours of her emptiness. It was not the shape of Eve. She knew that as well as she knew her reflection. She remembers letting Eve go.

Sometimes she sat with confusion and blankness and let that be enough.

She danced badly alone in her room to Elton John and national anthems. No need to choose.

She cried and did not cry.

Lonely without the need to escape it, powerful without the need to be god.

She dated someone for more than two months and sat on a couch with pizza and popcorn and when it collapsed (of course it collapsed) she walked away and let them live.

She killed for work and went home.

She stopped trying to fill the void and started learning to make its acquaintance, enjoy its potential, acknowledge its edge. She let herself rest.

She drew pictures of her mother and ripped them up, drew them again and asked them questions, drew them again and answered back. _I did cry. I have been happy. Do not call it darkness, Mama. Call me daughter. Call me different. Darkness is just an excuse._

She drank too much. Vomited. Cleaned it up.

Fire cannot burn down emptiness, even when flames continue to rage; at some point she learned to live with the absence, to make peace with cinders and ash.

\---

She remembers when Eve returned. The details were blurry and made as much sense as a flat earth conspiracy, but there she was. Years later. Walking towards her across a room.

Not to save her (Villanelle didn’t need it), not to mother her (that’s not what this was), not because she had nobody left (time had passed and there had been others). But because Eve wanted this. Because Eve chose her.

“You look different.”

“I am also the same.”

“Is that good?”

“I would like to show you.”

They walked for hours. The dark streets of a city in Europe. It might have been London or Paris or Athens. It wasn’t Rome. At some point, their hands met, fingers tangled, no need for ribbons or ropes to bind. They talked with words that now were easy and sat in silence that felt like home.

On a bench, near a river. The sun started to rise.

“Please don’t say something about light and darkness.”

“How about I say nothing at all?”

She wasn’t looking for a mirror. She didn’t need Eve anymore. Eve was not like her. She knew that. She liked her all the same. And more.

The kiss was different. More space for another longing, rooted in a deeper desire.

It lasted minutes. It promised a lifetime.

She let Eve bring her home.

\---

Days and nights and years and years. Villanelle still dreams of fire. When she wakes up, screaming, sweating, she reaches for Eve and Eve is there.

\---

**Author's Note:**

> That episode hit close to home! Thanks for reading. Please comment/kudos if you like it!


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